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Cloudflare has launched Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay for AI agents, giving them a verified identity and controlled access to payments.
The move addresses a growing problem for online businesses as software agents begin browsing websites, calling APIs and making purchases on users' behalf. Site operators often struggle to distinguish legitimate automated activity from fraud, abuse or opportunistic scraping.
Under the new system, each Cloudflare account receives a unique web address that serves as a persistent identifier. Users can delegate that identity to individual AI agents, allowing a merchant or service provider to see who authorised the request while still letting the user remain pseudonymous.
Cloudflare is also introducing a wallet structure for agent transactions. An Account Wallet sits at the top level and can receive, hold and manage stablecoins, while separate Virtual Wallets can be assigned to individual agents with rules set by the human owner.
Those rules include a spending cap, a list of approved merchants and a maximum transaction size, letting an agent pay for online goods or services without unrestricted access to the owner's funds.
Identity problem
The announcement reflects a broader shift in internet traffic as AI tools increasingly act on behalf of people and companies, rather than simply generating text or analysing data in the background. If an agent turns up to buy software, reserve computing resources or register for a service, the receiving business must decide whether the request is genuine, authorised and safe to accept.
Existing bot detection systems were largely built to manage search indexing or block malicious automation. They are less suited to a world in which automated systems are expected to carry out legitimate commercial tasks for named users or organisations.
That leaves online businesses facing a difficult trade-off: restrict automated traffic heavily and risk excluding legitimate agent-driven commerce, or allow agents through with limited means of checking who stands behind them.
Cloudflare is trying to address both identity and payment in a single framework. The wallet and identity products sit alongside its Monetisation Gateway, creating a market structure for agents that need to prove who they represent and pay for the resources they use.
Payments layer
Stablecoins are central to the wallet design, indicating that Cloudflare sees blockchain-based digital dollars and similar instruments as a practical way to settle machine-to-machine transactions. By separating a master wallet from agent-specific wallets, it is applying a familiar treasury model to automated software.
That structure could appeal to businesses that want to experiment with AI agents carrying out narrow tasks such as buying data access, paying for premium API calls or completing low-value online purchases, while retaining tight oversight of where money can go.
The use of a unique web address as an identity marker also suggests Cloudflare wants to anchor agent verification in internet-native infrastructure rather than rely solely on platform-specific credentials. For customers already running services on Cloudflare, that may create a direct link between account ownership and agent behaviour.
Matthew Prince, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cloudflare, framed the launch as a response to changing patterns of online activity.
"The Internet is shifting from human-driven browsing to agent-driven commerce, and the infrastructure needs to keep up," Prince said. "When an agent shows up at your door, you need to know who sent it. Cloudflare can give agents a face-a link to the human or organization that owns them-so that trust, accountability, and real commerce can follow. It's the identity and payment infrastructure the agentic web needs to function."
Market implications
The launch places Cloudflare more directly in the emerging market for agentic commerce, where infrastructure groups, payment companies and AI developers are all trying to define how autonomous software should identify itself, gain permission to act and settle transactions.
For merchants, the appeal lies in clearer attribution. If a request can be traced to an identified account holder, sellers may be more willing to offer services to software agents, especially where transactions involve scarce digital goods, trial access or usage-based services vulnerable to abuse.
For users, delegated wallets with preset controls offer a way to test commercial autonomy without handing an AI system unrestricted authority. That may become more important as businesses begin deploying agents not only for information gathering but also for procurement and operational tasks.
Handle reservation for cloudflare.pay is now open. Broader wallet functions include the ability to move funds in and out, issue Virtual Wallets, define a spending cap, set an approved merchant list and impose a maximum transaction size that an agent cannot exceed on its own.